E-mail is the most popular use of the internet in absolute terms, and its origins predate the World Wide Web by more than a decade. It was first used to send messages between participants inside a closed system, such as a university computer lab, and later expanded to enable asynchronous messaging inside the same domain (i.e. university campus). Once the various academic and military institutions began to integrate their communications systems, e-mail as we know it today, with the ubiquitous ‘@’ symbol, came into being.
In the pre-internet and pre-multimedia era, e-mail was a text-based messaging system. Over time, an extensive infrastructure has been laid down for the transport and handling of e-mail. However, this infrastructure is the naturally evolved path that post-facto deals with the additional demands made by today's e-mail users, and is more in reaction to their demands than in anticipation of their needs.
The added load of large-volume transmissions, especially file downloads and media broadcasts from internet websites, has spurred the development of higher-bandwidth, always-on networks, such as broadband/DSL. Due to their higher capacity, point-to-point networks, which do not require intermediary servers, became feasible.
E-mail today is an amalgam of attachments, endless forwards and replies (with all prior text included), subject changes, and multiple recipients appearing, disappearing and reappearing. In short, people use e-mail to hold conversations. However, conventional e-mail clients and servers are not designed to display conversations in a concise, clear, and intuitive manner. Rather, they include additional material which obscures the actual exchange.
As a partial attempt to rectify the shortcomings of e-mail, other electronic messaging systems, such as internet messaging and Voice over IP telephony, have been invented.
Accordingly, there is a long felt need for an electronic messaging system which provides a user-friendly display of the content of continuing exchanges, so as to facilitate electronic conversations.